Collateral Damage
by northernexposure
Summary: Adama sits with an ailing Roslin - a short coda to the episode 'Pegasus'.


**Collateral Damage**

**A/N:** Currently whipping through my first _BSG_ rewatch since the series aired. This floated into my head – a coda to a scene in _Pegasus_ in which Adama sits with an ailing Roslin. Thank you to MissyHissy3 for the beta read!

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><p>It hits him harder than he would like to admit, seeing her like this.<p>

Billy Keikeya tried to warn him, speaking of illness in that soft, hesitant way that civilians have, as if the way you tell a thing can have any effect on an inevitable outcome. Adama brushed the words aside, hearing them and dismissing them as easily as he took his next breath. What could this boy tell him of death? Even before the attack on the Colonies, Bill Adama knew the weight of it, the feel. He knew grief, had felt it for a child – surely the most vicious loss of all? – and then for the beloved wife who had borne that child.

Laura Roslin is dying. He knows this. _He knows it._ Death is the only surety in this universe, a fact every old soldier knows: that hers is coming incrementally is a truth he assimilated the moment she told him of her insidious, invisible, necessarily feminine sickness. He knows what death looks like: he has caused it himself, more than once. What warning does he, of all people, need?

His arrogance leaves him unprepared. There is a blow waiting for him as he steps into her office and it comes in her shape. Her familiar and yet suddenly diminished form fills his vision until he can see nothing else, and he wonders if she sees the shock she has given him reverberating in his eyes. Over the scant months that he has known her, Adama has come to admire Laura's strength: this slight woman, this _school teacher _who has not shirked the troubles of an entire race. Contrary to appearances, he knows her to have a backbone that rivals that of any Admiral he ever knew. So, to see her this way: fragile, weak, swamped in a white bathrobe that is barely paler than her face… Yes, it is a blow. A heavy, blinding blow.

_I have good days and bad days_, she tells him, and he hopes to the gods this is one of the latter, while simultaneously knowing that soon enough she will settle for being able to breathe unaided and call it something positive. He realises, now, that he has been denying the truth: he, William Adama, who prides himself on weathering any storm, has ignored one that has been looming on his Dradis for months.

One day soon, he will walk into this office, and she will not be here.

Adama sits beside her, voiceless as this thought punches a path through his gut. Laura smiles at him. He notes how the lines on her face crinkle around her eyes like the brush strokes of an oil painting, eyes that he now realises he has always, albeit unconsciously, considered to be beautiful. Stripped of everything as she is, Laura Roslin exudes an exhausted tranquillity that is deeply calming. He wants to tell her that he appreciates the trust she has shown in letting him see her like this, but instead he keeps to the essentials, knowing that she won't last long.

When she coughs, he passes her water, his hand on her shoulder as he feels the convulsions wrack her body, which is thinner than he realised: she hides her frailty well beneath those few surviving suits. When they clasp hands, her skin is hot and paper-dry. It is the skin of a dying woman. It is the skin of a woman he has not known for long enough.

Adama tries to take his leave before she can see his tears, but she calls him back before he can prevent them from falling. He hopes she hasn't realised what she has done to him: that she hasn't seen the cracked façade. Yet it is him she is worried for. _Be careful, Bill_, she tells him, as if somehow he is the one who should live in fear. And in that single moment he would kill the remaining universe to have her whole enough to hold.

Outside, he meets Billy's eye with a steady look, though he knows her aide can see the tracks of the tears on his face. The boy stays silent. He only nods, a motion that combines _nothing_ and _everything_ with such knowing grace that the older man is humbled.

Adama goes back to _Galactica_ and shuts himself in his quarters. He calls Lee, for no other reason than to hear his son's voice. As they talk, briefly, he pulls out a glass and his stash of whisky, for once not bothering to meter his pour.

The silence is heavy when he ends the call, the echo of the receiver slamming home holding a sense of finality he does not want to contemplate. Who knows what that sound will mean the next time he hears it: what calamity he will have been told of, what new crisis he will be required to manage. For now, there is only silence, and the full glass in his hand; the burn of the liquor in his throat.

Bill Adama sits with his pain. He pulls it out of himself and sets it on the table before him. He regards it properly, closely, from all sides. It is a hard thing, a thing of blackness and right angles, a monolith so intractable that he knows instinctively it will never diminish. It is not only Laura: it is Zak, it is Carolanne, it is his father, his mother, it is every man and woman he has lost under his command, it is every member of the entire human frakking race, and they are all dead, they are all dying, and he can't do a godsdamn thing about it.

_Yet this,_ he thinks, _this is what will save us in the end_. _That still we fall in love, even when all hope is gone. _

[END]


End file.
